NEW FORMS OF FERNS. 



By Charles T. Druery. 



Mr. Willard N. Clute's note in the Bulletin for last July 

 anent a new form of Dicksonia pilosiuscula leads me to enter a 

 protest against solitary new finds being treated as mere herbarium 

 material. I note that all the fronds (ten) were taken, and that 

 later in the season, six more were secured. The finder who 

 deliberately denudes a fern of its fronds twice in a season will 

 be nine times out of ten its destroyer, and the fern world robbed 

 of a great possibility (for wild sports become occasionally the 

 progenitors of marvelously developed and improved types) in 

 order that a few herbaria may be enriched with dead fronds and 

 practical epitaphs. 



I am the more moved to this protest as I have recently heard 

 of similar cases elsewhere, where absolutely unique and hitherto 

 unknown varieties of unusual merit have been found as solitary 

 examples. Knowing the finder of one of these, I instantly 

 wrote, begging for spores or a division on exchange lines, only 

 to hear that the plant was left in situ and fronds (sterile) alone 

 taken, all chance of propagating them being thus thrown away. 

 Further, the locality was indicated to another friend who also 

 took fronds for his herbarium, each man thus doing the very 

 opposite of what he should by contributing to the destruction 

 of the "find" instead of its perpetuation. 



Now. for the other side. In 1881 I found in a remote part 

 of Exmoor a perfectly new form of Blechnum spicant (B. s. 

 concinnum Druery). It was a small plant, solitary as to type, 

 and bore only six barren fronds. I carefully extracted it, freed 

 it from the bunch of normals from which an extreme frond 

 tip had only emerged to catch my eye, as it were, beseechingly, 

 wrapped it in damp moss, took it home and potted it up. The 

 next season it bore spores. I sowed these and subsequently 

 distributed three hundred typical specimens, so that it is now 

 open to any one to acquire it. Lasttwi aemula cristata afforded 

 a similar case. The finder failed to raise it, and it remained 

 for the writer again to secure a future for it by wide dis- 

 tribution. This, I maintain, is the absolute duty of any fern 



